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For N.H.L. Owners, Lockout Is a Calculated Risk

Last season, the N.H.L. generated $3.3 billion, the seventh straight season of record revenue. But on Wednesday, the day before what would have been the opening night for a new season with continued bright prospects for growth, teams stood idle. Players remained locked out by the owners and Commissioner Gary Bettman, and instead of the flash and clangor of hockey in boisterous rinks across North America, the only thing to anticipate was the dull spectacle of a negotiating session in Midtown Manhattan.

League and union negotiators met in two sessions Wednesday, their first official bargaining since Friday, but they remained focused on secondary issues like player safety rather than how to divide league earnings. Bill Daly, the deputy commissioner, estimated the N.H.L. had lost as much as $250 million in revenue because of the cancellation of the preseason and the first two weeks of the regular season. “We felt that over the last seven years we’ve built up a lot of momentum in the business, we’ve had a lot of growth,” Daly said. “Who knows what a work stoppage like this will do to that momentum?”

Daly was talking about what he saw as the union’s reluctance to accept a settlement, but he could just as easily have been describing the calculation league management was making in calling the lockout.

Bettman and the owners have twice before chosen to lock out the players after weighing the pluses of gaining a more advantageous labor deal against the minuses of angering fans and derailing momentum. For them, the lure of clawing back hundreds of millions of dollars from the players made it worth the risk.

Part of that strategy was the owners’ belief that the N.H.L. could bounce back from lockouts with increased attendance and improved television ratings.

“We recovered last time because we have the world’s greatest fans,” Bettman said in August.

Although Major League Baseball saw attendance drop by 26 percent after the 1994 strike, the N.H.L. had modest attendance gains in the immediate aftermath of its previous lockouts. Average attendance rose from 15,512 in the 1993-94 season to 15,867 in the lockout-shortened 1995 season, and from 16,549 the year before the season-long 2004-5 lockout to 16,954 the year after. The majority of the N.H.L. ticket base comes from season-ticket holders rather than single-game sales, helping to ensure that attendance will not drop drastically.

The N.B.A.’s experience after its lockout last season also provided persuasive evidence for N.H.L. owners. Despite shortening its regular season by 16 games, the N.B.A. set records for television viewership and traffic on its online properties.

The N.H.L. owners’ choice was easy in the 2004-5 lockout. Bettman had long built the case that the league was losing money and needed to sharply reduce players’ wages. The N.H.L. was struggling from a variety of ills, ranging from stagnant play to frequent franchise relocation, and its status in the United States was headed to that of a niche sport. Sacrificing an entire season was a simple call, and it paid off when the owners won concessions from the players that included a salary cap and a 24 percent pay cut.

But in 1994-95, the choice was more difficult. The N.H.L. had momentum, coming off Stanley Cup finals that featured Wayne Gretzky’s Los Angeles Kings in 1993 and the victory of Mark Messier’s Rangers in 1994. On top of that, the Disney Corporation joined the league with the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim in 1993.

The headline on the cover of Sports Illustrated in June 1994 read “Why the N.H.L.’s Hot and the N.B.A.’s Not.” Yet Bettman and the owners, intent on trying to reduce players’ wages, opted to delay the start of the next season with a lockout.

“Everyone was feeling pretty good about the N.H.L., and there was a lot of momentum coming off the Rangers’ win that the league could take advantage of,” said Bob Gutkowski, Madison Square Garden’s president at the time. “The owners understood that and the other negatives surrounding a lockout, but the ultimate decision was that we had to change the business model.”

Neil Smith, the general manager of the Rangers in 1994, said the lockout caused serious damage to the N.H.L.’s momentum.

“The league never got as close again to the N.B.A. as it was at the time of that lockout,” said Smith, now a hockey commentator for Canadian television. “When we came back from the lockout, we were further behind the N.B.A. than we were prior, and the N.B.A. picked it up from there and we couldn’t make up the ground. There was a real opportunity for us, but we couldn’t get it back.”

The N.H.L. started to get it back only after the 2004-5 lockout, and last season the league generated about 83 percent of the revenue of the N.B.A.

But once again Bettman and the owners are risking the momentum they have built. The last five Stanley Cup winners came from Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, Pittsburgh and Detroit, all big American markets. The N.H.L. finally has a lucrative TV contract in the United States, a 10-year, $2 billion deal it signed with NBC last year.

“They’ve really grown the last few years,” Smith said. “But with this lockout, they’re going to lose momentum, no matter what.”

Ultimately what the N.H.L. is sacrificing in this latest lockout cannot be measured solely in attendance or revenue figures. Sooner or later, the league will find out what opportunity may have been lost.

Correction: October 14, 2012

An article on Thursday about the N.H.L. owners’ risking the league’s positive momentum by having another lockout misstated when the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim joined the league. They joined in 1993; they were not “set to join the league” at the time of the 1994-95 lockout.

A version of this article appears in print on October 11, 2012, on page B16 of the New York edition with the headline: Learning From Past, N.H.L. Owners See the Lockout as a Calculated Risk. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe